“In 2015, we continued to be reminded that there is no such thing as
perfect security,” said Kevin Mandia, SVP and president, FireEye.
“Based on the significant number of incidents that Mandiant
investigated in 2015, threat actors are finding inventive and
disruptive ways to skirt even the best defenses, resulting in
informational, financial and reputational loss.”

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• The time it takes organizations to discover compromises
continues to drop. The median number of days attackers were
present on a victim’s network before being discovered dropped to 146
days in 2015 from 205 days in 2014; however, breaches can go
undetected for years. • Breaches continue to be discovered
by third-party sources. Mandiant’s investigations of attacks
show that external identification takes longer, with an average of
319.5 days from compromise to discovery. Internal discovery takes an
average of 56 days. • Disruptive attacks are becoming more
common. Over the past year, Mandiant responded to incidents where
attackers destroyed critical business systems, leaked confidential
data, held companies for ransom, and taunted executives. Some
attackers were motivated by money, some claimed to be retaliating for
political purposes, and others simply wanted to cause embarrassment.

FireEye has invented
a purpose-built, virtual machine-based security platform that provides
real-time threat protection to enterprises and governments worldwide
against the next generation of cyber attacks. These highly
sophisticated cyber attacks easily circumvent traditional
signature-based defenses, such as next-generation firewalls, IPS,
anti-virus, and gateways. The FireEye
Threat Prevention Platform provides real-time, dynamic threat
protection without the use of signatures to protect an organization
across the primary threat vectors and across the different stages of
an attack life cycle. The core of the FireEye platform is a virtual
execution engine, complemented by dynamic threat intelligence, to
identify and block cyber attacks in real time. FireEye has over 4,400
customers across 67 countries, including more than 680 of the Forbes
Global 2000.